Rome and Victoria. 159 



CRATERS. 



As I have already mentioned, we cannot trace the ash- 

 beds of Rome to their craterform sources, as we can in 

 Victoria. They may be beneath the bed of the Mediterra- 

 nean, as the Bay of Naples now covers the stirring caldron 

 from which Naples obtained its ash. One must go about 

 fifteen miles to get a view of a Roman extinct crater. At 

 Lake Albano we find ourselves in the midst of the Fields of 

 Fire. An amphitheatre of hills spreads out before the eye 

 to the north, north-east, and north-west. Monte Cavo, with 

 its snowy cap^ is half a dozen miles from Albano. Pila is of 

 the same range. Priora, Campatri, and Porzio, belched out 

 their fires more to the northward. 



One of the distant craters is Lake Bolsena, sixty miles 

 north-west of Rome, and twenty-six miles in circumference. 

 Mount Cimini, over Viterbo, was on the boundary between 

 Etruria and Rome, and long sheltered the brave Etruscans 

 in its forests and ravines from the gTasp of Rome. Lake 

 Vico, near it, is supposed to have engiilfed an Etrurian city. 

 Lake Bracciano, the ancient Sabatinus, is twenty-five miles 

 west of Rome, and twenty miles round. By it is a hollow 

 plain, Baccano, once on a crater, ten miles round, and a 

 source of ashes, which has even now a sulphurous pool in its 

 centre. I looked over a similar volcanic hollow, called Val- 

 lariccia, near Albano, which Strabo said was formerly filled 

 with water. Lake Nemi, a gem near Lake Albano, is nearly 

 a mile across, and quite an oval crater. 



Lake Albano was the particular object of my attention 

 and observation. One of the Roman railways, supposed to 

 go to Albano, landed me and the four other passengers by 

 that train at a lone house on the wide and dreary Campagna^ 

 some two miles from the city. Reaching, at last, that town 

 of poverty, uncleanliness, and idleness, I hastened by the 

 Etruscan monument, raised to the son of Porsenna, and, 

 untormented by guides, mounted 1450 feet above the sea, 

 near to the Castel Gondolfo, the charming summer pala.ce of 

 the Pope, and looked down upon the gently rippling waters 

 of Lake Albano. There I found gToves of the oak, ilex, 

 chesnut and stone pine, in their native homes, unsupplanted 

 by the olive and the vine. On the inside of the slopes of 

 the crater a very luxuriant vegetation impeded my way. 

 The lake lay hundreds of feet below, two miles and a quarter 

 long, by one and a quarter broad. An emissarium, con- 



